Alexandra Daddario had already found a great deal of success in Hollywood before True Detective kicked off its run on HBO back in 2014. She had a starring role in the Percy Jackson movies, led Texas Chainsaw 3D and also had multi-episode runs on shows like White Collar and Parenthood. But even then, Daddario had yet to tap into the full range of her craft. She was determined to show the industry that she had even more to offer, and True Detective afforded her that opportunity.
Daddario plays Lisa Tragnetti in Season 1 of the HBO show, a court reporter who becomes involved with Woody Harrelson’s Martin Hart. Again, Daddario already had a whole bunch of projects coming her way at that point, but her run on True Detective kicked the door wide open to even more opportunities, significantly upping her profile in the industry in the process.
While on Collider Ladies Night celebrating the debut of The White Lotus on HBO, Daddario took a moment to look back on some of her greatest successes thus far, and pinpointed True Detective as a big one:
“The biggest successes I’ve had in my career, I did not expect or they were completely out of the blue. And the biggest jobs I’ve booked, I had no concept that I was gonna book them. So I’ve tried to maintain my sanity or whatever my viewpoint on life is, I try not to put too many expectations on things. I do have more knowledge and understanding of tracking and how things are gonna work, but True Detective, for example, which I’m sure we'll get to, it’s like, I didn’t see what was gonna happen from that coming at all. I don’t even think I was invited to that premiere. I didn’t go to the premiere of that show and then it ended up being a huge thing for my career. So you just never know what’s gonna happen, so I just try to do the best I can in whatever I choose to do and that’s it.”
Daddario has called choosing to do True Detective a “tactical decision” in the past and elaborated a bit on the strategy she was implementing by making that choice:
“The tactical decision was, I went in for the audition and they seemed vaguely interested, and it was for a different role and I was like, ‘Well, they’re vaguely interested and I love these actors and I love Cary Fukunaga and I want to be in this show, so let me force them to hire me.’ [Laughs] I thought I need something on my resume that shows that I can do something different, or something. I just thought it would look good on my resume. That was where I sort of was at at that point. And that would look to Hollywood like, ‘Oh, she’s doing something different!’”
So ultimately, did that tactical decision pay off? Did True Detective prove to be the resume game-changing Daddario hoped for? Here’s what she said:
“I didn’t expect to have what I had happen happen, which was - it’s a long time ago now - getting naked on a show where I didn’t have a huge role, I didn’t know what to expect. And then of course that episode aired and my manager called, and I’ll never forget it, I was sitting on my boyfriend’s couch and she calls me in the morning after the episode aired and she was like, ‘The phone’s been ringing off the hook all morning. The phone won’t stop ringing!’ And all of a sudden, everyone in town wanted to meet with me and then I booked San Andreas. So no, I would have never expected that from that role. It was tactical, but not that tactical.”
There was no wrapping up the True Detective portion of our conversation without following up on one particular point Daddario mentioned -- that premiere. Given the attention that role garnered and the fact that Daddario’s star is pretty powerful, it’s a bit surprising to hear she wasn’t on the True Detective premiere invite list to me. But did she perceive it that way herself?
“I mean, everyone has an ego, but I’m like, ‘If they want me, they’ll call me,’ you know? And if not, I need to build a rich enough life apart from that to be happy. I didn’t expect to be invited. It was only afterwards in retrospect when I was at the Emmys that I was like, ‘Wow, I’m a big enough part of this show to be invited to the Emmys on behalf of the show even though I’m not nominated.’ But it was just something that I don’t think anybody expected including myself. I really didn’t expect people to have that reaction to that character the way that they did.”
There’s a whole lot more from where this came from! If you’d like to hear more from Daddario on the Percy Jackson movies, the learning curve she experienced making Texas Chainsaw 3D, going toe-to-toe with Connie Britton in The White Lotus and more, check out our uncut conversation in podcast form below: